GeForce GTX 750 Ti
GIGABYTE
www.gigabyte.us
I t’s true, we spill more ink writing about flagship GPUs, architectures, and the high- priced graphics cards that house them than we do about entry-level and mainstream cards. But for a vast majority of the general PC gaming populace, the mainstream graphics card is what will ultimately end up in their systems.
GIGABYTE just sent us an intriguing option for those gamers who were entertaining questionable means of making money just to play the games they love: the GeForce GTX 750 Ti (model GV-N75TOC-2GI).
This card features NVIDIA’s newest GPU architecture, codenamed Maxwell. The GM107 GPU that serves as the brains behind this graphics card consists of 1.87 billion transistors. Architecturally speaking, the GTX 750 Ti features five streaming multiprocessors (SMMs, formerly SMX), each of which has four groups of 32 CUDA cores. That’s a total of 128 CUDA cores per SMM, versus 192 homogenized CUDA cores per each of Kepler’s SMX units. The four groups of CUDA cores in each of Maxwell’s SMMs has access to dedicated warp schedulers and registers, as well as their own texture cache.
Although it’s not as fast as the GTX 660, the GTX 750 Ti has a 75W TDP , compared to the GTX 660’s 140W TDP . Like the reference design from NVIDIA, GIGABYTE’s card has a 128-bit memory bus and 2GB GDDR5, clocked at the stock 1,350MHz. The stock core and boost clocks are 1,020MHz and 1,085MHz, respectively, but GIGABYTE wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to milk a little extra performance from this card’s more energy-efficient GPU.
This card boasts core and boost clocks of 1,033MHz and 1,111MHz, respectively.
As you’d expect, the cooler on this card also gets some special treatment. It features a WINDFORCE 2X cooler, which consists of a pair of ultra-quiet 75mm PWM fans and a large, 8mm S-shaped copper heatpipe surrounded by a multitude of aluminum fins.
An angular black plastic heat shroud features the WINDFORCE logo and matches the style we’ve seen on most of the recent GIGABYTE cards we’ve tested. For power, this card relies on a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector. Overall, GIGABYTE’s GTX 750 Ti measures 7.5 inches long. On the backplane, you’ll find a dual-link DVI-I, DVI-D, and two HDMI ports.
Like many of the GIGABYTE cards we see, this GTX 750 Ti features Ultra Durable 2 VGA technology, which consists of Japanese solid state caps, a lower RDS(on) MOSFET design, and ferrite core chokes. All this helps the card perform better, run cooler, and overclock more reliably.
This card couldn’t quite handle the game benchmarks we ran at a stratospheric 2,560 x 1,600, but its performance improved dramatically at 1,920 x 1,200, which means 1080p is probably this card’s sweet spot when it comes to modern games.
With GIGABYTE’s new GeForce GTX 750 Ti, gamers on a budget can get a very compelling experience.
Specs & Scores
GIGABYTE
GeForce GTX
750 Ti
Core clock 1,033MHz
Boost clock 1,111MHz
Memory clock 1,350MHz
Memory interface 128-bit
Memory 2GB GDDR5
3DMark Professional
(Fire Strike Extreme)
1970
Graphics Score 1958
Physics Score 13653
Unigine Heaven 4.0 (1,920 x 1,200)
Score 461
FPS 18.3
Games (1,920 x 1,200)
Metro: Last Light
(16XAF)
28fps
Aliens vs. Predator
(4XAA, 16XAF)
33.6fps
(2,560 x 1,600)
Metro: Last Light
(16XAF)
17.67fps
Aliens vs. Predator
(4XAA, 16XAF)
20.2fps